A215 – TMA3 Poetry – Chaos Monkeys

This is one of two poems submitted as part of the poetry assignment for A215 Creative Writing.

Chaos Monkeys

No typewriters for these monkeys, pressing random
buttons on keyboards and boxen. There
goes the power, the server’s down.

Chaos monkeys cannot read, instead they watchNetflix, that set them free in the darkness
of the internet. Where did they lurk before?

Did they hide in the telephone
exchanges, or with gremlins somewhere
mechanical and unloved? Down dusty corridors behind
doors marked ‘no entry to unauthorised personnel’.

All they want is somewhere warm, with food. Perhaps
they are refugees from a lab where they spent time solving puzzles
for treats, until they finally opened the door. At night they
wandered corridors, climbed ladders looking for more.

Like Pavlov’s dog, they explore for food. Pressed
into service they explore the world wide web
pulling plugs on servers. Every outage earns
a reward, they google for greed.

[Note: The video on demand company, Netflix, created a program referred to as a ‘chaos monkey’ to test the resilience of their cloud computing service by randomly switching off servers to see whether or not the service kept working.]